i referenced an article last week which claimed that, out of all the provinces in canada, quebec has the most corruption. i wondered out loud what the story was with french canadians, but françois objected saying that the problem is not (only?) the french canadians in quebec, but rather multicultural montreal inflating the corruption numbers for quebec on the whole. he pointed out that montreal has its share of italian mafioso types, for instance. certainly, as we all know, italians are no strangers to corruption and nepotism, and so it might, indeed, be a problem for montreal — and quebec — that seven percent of montreal’s inhabitants have an italian background. not to mention, like i already said, the general multicultiness of montreal. that doesn’t ever seem to lead to less corruption (unless you have an unbelievably wise leader).

still, i wondered if françois was right and that, if you took montreal out of the mix, that quebec wouldn’t look any more corrupt than, say, saskatchewan. so i looked around for corruption data for canada broken down by province and came up with…

…nada. (mind you, i didn’t really look all that hard, so it might be out there somewhere on the innerwebs.)

what i did find, however, are some neat data on the civic behaviors of canadians by province: things like amount of time spent volunteering, donations, and trust in others, etc.

before i present some of that data, i want to make it clear that complaining that canadians aren’t civic enough would be like complaining that germans don’t like beer enough — totally nonsensical! by any sort of metric that you look at — transparency international’s corruption perceptions index (canada was number 10 in 2011) or the world values survey civicness numbers — canadians are a very civic bunch. living anywhere in canada — quebec included — would obviously NOT feel like living anywhere in eastern europe or the arab world.

having said that:

so the québécois trust others quite a lot less than other canadians do. a lot less. now, maybe that’s all down to the presence of montreal in quebec, but then why are the people in ontario so gosh-durned trusting? i mean, ontario’s got toronto and last time i checked that is very multiculti city. (the greater toronto metropolitan region, btw, comprises nearly half of ontario’s population — 5.5M out of 12.8M — and the montreal metro area is about the same for quebec — 3.8M out of 7.9M.)

couldn’t find this trust data broken down intra-regionally.

but here are some data for donations that i did find broken down by cities within regions — this chart is sorted by “mean charitable donation” (note that the figures for percent english or french for each city come from either wikipedia or here which is where most of the wikipedia figures seem to have come from) [click on chart for LARGER view]:

as you can see, the six quebec cities in the survey all rank right at the bottom of the list wrt how much money they donated in 2010. british columbians, otoh, are right up there at the top. i found a positive 0.57 correlation between the percentage of english-canadians living in a city and mean donation size, and conversely a negative 0.58 (-0.58) correlation between the percentage of french-canadians living in a city and mean donation size. in other words, if you want to benefit from large charitable donations in canada, make sure you live where there are lots of people of english ancestry — british columbia seems to be your best bet.

françois might make the montreal objection again, but what about places in quebec with high numbers of french-canadians but negligible numbers of other ethnic groups (like italians) — sherbrooke and saguenay, for instance — why are the people in those places so comparatively ungenerous?

the funniest contrast is between gatineau in quebec and ottawa in ontario which are right across the ontario river from each other. in 2001, 37.6% of the gatineau population responded that they had french ancestry, but only 6.4% said they had english ancestry. the next biggest group after french was the irish at 7.6%. italians were only 1.4% of the population. otoh, gatineau’s neighbor, ottawa, had 24.3% of english decent. and more italians than gatineau (4.9%). but ottawans were much more generous than people from gatineau in 2010.

here are the data sorted another way — by the percentages of taxfilers in each city who claimed deductions for their donations:

i found no correlation for either percent of english or french living in a city and the percentage of the population having given a donation (and claimed it on their taxes) in 2010. still, you can see on the chart that five of the six quebec cities are still in the lower half of the chart, four of them below the national average. but, most of the british columbian cities were also below the national average wrt the percentage of people in those cities actually giving donations. they may be big donors, but fewer of them actually donate than compared to people in, say, ontario.

so, the people in canadian cities with relatively high percentages of french-canadians give smaller charitable donations compared to the national average for canada, and they seem to give less frequently, too — although the connection between that latter behavior and french or english ethnicity doesn’t seem to be so strong. and the people in the province with the most french canadians — quebec — trust others much less than the rest of canadians. and, as seen in the previous post, quebec experiences the most corruption.

there’s something up with french canadians, i think. my guess is that, like other inbred populations, they’re more family-oriented than anglos. they might not be giving so generously to strangers because they’re busy giving generously to close and extended family members. i dunno. this is hardly the last word on the social/civic behaviors of french canadians. further research is required! (~_^)

They did experience rather explosive population growth with little immigration (and surely a fair degree of emigration) for quite a while. This meant that a lot of inbreeding was going on, out of necessity. The question is could the 200 years or so be enough to lead to these seemingly un-civic behaviors? Complete speculation, but perhaps the harshness of the Canadian winter selected fairly strongly for kin-altruism?

Quebec is the spoiled child province in Canada. They are always whining about something, always have their hand out wanting more from the federal government, and threatening to separate if they don’t get it. They just voted in a separatist provincial government.

As an example, the cost of university tuition in Quebec is the lowest in Canada. It is subsidized by the rest of Canada. Recently the provincial government said they were going to raise tuition a little bit, and it literally created riots.

Where do they think they are going to get all their handouts from if they leave Canada? They seem to have the same mentality as Greece. A lot of people in the rest of Canada want them to leave–except then we would have a banana republic in the middle of the country.

By the way, Trudeau, who single handedly turned Canada multicultural (and seems to have lead the rest of the Western world in this respect) was from Quebec. Some speculate that he hated the British character of Canada so much that we decided to destroy it. He is bitterly hated by many.

Nowadays, French Canadians are the most secular people in North America. Could it be that Church donations inflates that charitable donation chart? Also, Quebecers pay the highest tax rates in Canada, it could have an impact. Finally, French Canadians do not have the tradition of giving to institutions like schools, hospitals, museums like the English Canadians do. In the old days thoses institutions were taking care of by the Religious orders and now by the government.

melykin, Quebec, like many similar Western welfare states, has a lot of problems, that’s for sure, and the cultural divide and indifference between Quebec and Canada is widening. But, making the case that Quebecers are whiners by whining about Quebec is not very serious. French Canadians are not the nuisance and freeloaders you describe and have contributed greatly to what Canada is today, economically and culturally.

And Pierre Elliott Trudeau(or the Half-blood prince as Steve Sailer would say) did not like the French Canadian traditional society either. He spent his entire political career trying to dilude the British and French Canadian characters of Canada into a post-modern, multicultural Canada.

now i know that quebec≠french candians exactly, but it’s a pretty good indicator. and here we see that only 5.8% of people in quebec said they had no religious affilation, which the average for canada is 16.5%. iow, folks in quebec are more religious than the canadian average. they’re more religious than people in ontario … and waaaay more religious than people in british columbia (who, despite being so irreligious, were the most generous in their donations).

so, no — i don’t think religion is the answer here. probably plays some sort of role, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference in terms of trust/donations/corruption.

thanks for that link, though! that’s just the sort of stuff i’m interested in. (^_^)

From the link: “The Chronicle of Philanthropy found that the South gives roughly 5.2% of its discretionary income to charity– including both religious and non-religious groups – while New England only gives 4%. But if churches are excluded, the South’s percentage drops to 0.9% and New England’s only drops to 1.4%. New York state would be second in the country in giving if religion was removed from the equation, while Pennsylvania would jump from No. 40 into the top 5.”

@françois – “…church attendance is very low and the Catholic church influence is almost non-existent. That’s what I meant.”

i gotcha (i think — correct me if i’m wrong) — you’re saying that it’s church attendance that brings up charitable donation rates and not religiosity, per se. so, there are all these roman catholics, for instance, who say they’re roman catholics but they don’t go to mass much and, so, they don’t give to charity much. (but they’re probably still religious in the sense that they’re still believers — that’d be my guess anyway. otherwise they’d say they were agnostics/atheists.)

that could be. especially if a lot of these donations to charity that people are reporting are just their weekly envelopes that they drop in the basket (which, to me personally, shouldn’t count as a charitable donation — it’s more like paying for a service — but that’s just my own, quirky opinion!).

if wikipedia is to believed, though, church attendance is down right across canada, not just in quebec — and the two provinces with the lowest attendance rates (not clear to me what the source is) are quebec … and british columbia! the two provinces with the lowest and highest mean donation amounts (which might fit with what i’m saying). otoh, both quebec and british columbia had comparatively low numbers (percentages) of people donating at all, which might fit with the church attendance thing (which might fit with what you’re saying). (can we possibly both be right? (~_^) )

need to try to track down where those figures came from. prolly won’t be today, tho.

“English people have traditionally tended to prefer houses to flats, in low-density buildings with their own gardens. That’s a product of our historical family structure, which tends to be far more geared around a nuclear family, and this produced a particular English (and American) idea of independence; this makes for healthy democracies, but not for beautiful cities.”

Hard to believe a sentence like that being printed even two or three years ago.

@jayman – “The question is could the 200 years or so be enough to lead to these seemingly un-civic behaviors?”

dunno. like you say, they started off with a small population (founder effect) which is a sort of “inbreeding” in itself — and then there was also some amount of actual inbreeding (i.e. cousin marriage) that happened. the question is, would 200 years — ca. 8 generations (at a conservative 25 years/generation) — be enough time to 1) concentrate/select for new variations of kin altruism genes, and/or 2) alter the genetic relatedness across the population which would, in turn, affect the social behaviors (a la greying wanderer’s and other commenters’ idea/s)?

another possibility is that i am wrong (say it ain’t so! (~_^) ). the whole theory could be wrong, of course, but that’s not what i meant (altho that, too!) … what i mean is, perhaps french folks back in france were never quite as outbred as the english/dutch were. iow, perhaps, the french canadian founding population was not as outbred as i think they must’ve been. maybe the error lies back there. dunno.

@jayman – Complete speculation, but perhaps the harshness of the Canadian winter selected fairly strongly for kin-altruism?

maybe. but what about the anglo-canadians? are you saying they weren’t there for long enough to experience the same selective pressures?

@bjk – “Hard to believe a sentence like that being printed even two or three years ago.”

cool! ed west is awesome! been reading him for a couple of years now. (^_^)

(and — i’m very flattered — he does follow me on twitter, so maybe he did pick up the stuff about housing styles & mating/family patterns from me, although the idea certainly didn’t originate from me! there’s been a lot — a LOT — written about houses and different cultures and different family types [for example]. although i don’t ever recall ever reading anyone tying in the mating patterns side of it….)

I suspect that the Quebecois are just being rather French. An Aussie pal worked in France for a while and his wife wanted to work as an unpaid volunteer Doing Good, – the sort of thing that’s well understood in the English-speaking world. The French were bafffled and assumed that she was some sort of fraud.

bjk
“This is OT, but articles like this show the influence of HBD Chick and other HBDers in the mainstream press.”

Yes, apart from being full of explanatory win (imo), politically speaking, marriage culture is very neutral – it’s not like IQ or skull size or something.

.
hubchik
“what i mean is, perhaps french folks back in france were never quite as outbred as the english/dutch were. iow, perhaps, the french canadian founding population was not as outbred as i think they must’ve been”

I think this is likely to be part of it as france stayed more rural for longer.

I think being a minority might have an effect too. All else being equal if you’re 80% of a population and your taxes are going to the commonweal then 80% of your taxes are going to people of your ethnic group but if you’re only 20% of the population then you might see it as only 20% of your taxes is going to people of your ethnic group (even if it balances out evenly overall). That’s tax though not charity but if so i think there’d be a difference in the differential between Canada-wide and Quebec-only charitable giving also.

@g.w. – “I think being a minority might have an effect too. All else being equal if you’re 80% of a population and your taxes are going to the commonweal then 80% of your taxes are going to people of your ethnic group but if you’re only 20% of the population then you might see it as only 20% of your taxes is going to people of your ethnic group (even if it balances out evenly overall).”

@dearieme – “I suspect that the Quebecois are just being rather French. An Aussie pal worked in France for a while and his wife wanted to work as an unpaid volunteer Doing Good, – the sort of thing that’s well understood in the English-speaking world. The French were bafffled and assumed that she was some sort of fraud.”

heh! interesting anecdote. but your first sentence there then begs the question: why are the french so french?

“why are the french so french?”: the traditions of the English-speaking world require me to reply with remarks about traditions of Roman Catholicism and insufficient beef. Or perhaps it’s to do with drinking thin wines rather than hearty beers.

@dearieme – “the traditions of the English-speaking world require me to reply with remarks about traditions of Roman Catholicism and insufficient beef. Or perhaps it’s to do with drinking thin wines rather than hearty beers.”

(^_^) (^_^) (^_^)

lincolnshire roast beef, some roasted potatoes and yorkshire pudding, and a glass of boddingtons. yes, please! (d*mn. now i’ve made myself hungry.)

“I think being a minority might have an effect too. All else being equal if you’re 80% of a population and your taxes are going to the commonweal then 80% of your taxes are going to people of your ethnic group but if you’re only 20% of the population then you might see it as only 20% of your taxes is going to people of your ethnic group (even if it balances out evenly overall). That’s tax though not charity but if so i think there’d be a difference in the differential between Canada-wide and Quebec-only charitable giving also.”

Great idea, that was my thought as well. But if it is classic inbred kin-altruism going on, charity within province will be low too.

Jayman
“But if it is classic inbred kin-altruism going on, charity within province will be low too.”

Yes, i think that’s likely to be the base of it but i was wondering if there might be a difference in the difference between national-scale and local-scale charity.

In numbers out of ten if Newfoundland and Quebec rated a 6 and a 4 respectively for charities that effected the whole of Canada i was wondering if Newfoundland might still rate 6 on Newfoundland-only charities while Quebec jumps to 5 for Quebec-only charity.

@jayman – “How does the civicness of France compared to the rest of NW Europe?”

they always scored as less civic than the english in the 2005-08 wave of the world values survey — a lot less civic (the percentages are those responding that they are *active* members of such organizations — note that i didn’t screen for ethnicity — some day i have to go back and run these numbers again and pick out just the ethnic french, ethnic italians, etc., etc.):

“they always scored as less civic than the english in the 2005-08 wave of the world values survey — a lot less civic (the percentages are those responding that they are *active* members of such organizations “

Interesting. Italy and Germany also score rather low (in the case of the former, it’s likely the inbred south at play, in the case of the later, the apparently more inbred east?).

It seems the mating landscape in “core” Europe is a bit more complicated than it might first appear…

I wonder if the French are particularly lacking in certain dopamine receptor alleles (the ones associated with wanderlust). Unlike the other European nations that face the Atlantic, the French seem quite unsuccessful in exporting themselves abroad.

I’m familiar with both French Canada and English Canada, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that French Canadians are less religious than English Canadians. The word “religion” itself has a more negative connotation here than in the rest of Canada, and even more than in the U.S. Attentance figures don’t really capture the difference. A non-churchgoer in Quebec is more overtly antireligious than a non-churchgoer elsewhere.

I have not experienced more corruption in Quebec than in Ontario. The difference is that people here talk about it more. The media do their job of exposing corruption, which in most cases involves people of non-French background. The very same sort of thing happens in Ontario, but it’s considered impolite to talk too much about it, given the ethnic backgrounds of the people involved.

“I wonder if the French are particularly lacking in certain dopamine receptor alleles (the ones associated with wanderlust). Unlike the other European nations that face the Atlantic, the French seem quite unsuccessful in exporting themselves abroad.”

I think that’s physical geography again. The French being a continental power had to compete on land and sea whereas Britain could focus on the maritime.

In a word, I simply don’t believe those stats. 70% of Quebecois are religious? I’d have less trouble believing that the moon is made of green cheese. Practising Christians make up no more than 5% of Francophone Quebecois, and most of those people are now very elderly. Even people in their sixties are mostly non-religious.

@pete – “70% of Quebecois are religious? I’d have less trouble believing that the moon is made of green cheese.”

(^_^)

well, that number is more-or-less in accord with the one i posted the other day [above]: that just 16.5% of people in quebec said that they had no religious affiliation whatsoever (that was from the 2001 canadian census). meanwhile, 83% of people in quebec in 2001 said they were catholics.

i understand what you and françois are saying — that most people in quebec (and even canada) don’t go to church. but that doesn’t necessarily make people irreligious.

i come from a large clan of roman catholics myself, and out of my 52 first-cousins (plus myself), i don’t know of a single one who goes to church regularly. sure, weddings and funerals and christmas, but that’s it. (the older generation all attend weekly — or daily! — of course.) on the other hand, i know (because i’ve talked to them all about it at one point or another) that, except for me, all of them still believe in god and, therefore, in that way they are religious — and if they had been surveyed by the wvs people, i’m sure they would’ve answered “yes” to this question.

so i think a lot more quebecois could be religious than you think — they maybe just don’t go to church, or even talk about it much.

“I wonder if the French are particularly lacking in certain dopamine receptor alleles (the ones associated with wanderlust).”

The French and French Canadians in North America certainly didn’t lack wanderlust. They were very few and still you found them everywhere on the continent. Before Lewis and Clark, there was Radisson, Joliette, Marquette, La Salle, Cadillac, La Vérendrye, Étienne Provost, etc.

[…] Quebec has significantly a significantly lower obesity rate that its fellow Canadian provinces. As well, it has a somewhat lower cardiovascular mortality rate, though the difference here isn’t as dramatic as the difference between France proper and the Anglosphere. While not extremely so, this is consistent with the genetic explanation. (However, it’s worth noting that the Québécois aren’t genetically representative of all French, having descended from about 2,600 colonists from a few specific regions of France. As well, the Québécois have undergone subsequent evolution). […]

Quebec went from being a deeply religious society to a strongly anti-clerical one in less than a generation – Anglo-Canada wasn’t that religious in 1960, and wasn’t that anti-clerical in 1975. The collapse was apparently a result of local and global changes – as I heard it, there were some scandals in the Quebec Church at the time on top of the 1960s in general. But the Quebecois still swear blasphemously, while the French swear excretorially.

Also, don’t forget the intrepid French explorer who got so many roads in California named after him: Pierre Frontage!

if wikipedia is to believed, though, church attendance is down right across canada, not just in quebec — and the two provinces with the lowest attendance rates (not clear to me what the source is) are quebec … and british columbia! the two provinces with the lowest and highest mean donation amounts (which might fit with what i’m saying).

I realize that this is quite an old blog post, but I linked here from Jayman’s, and can’t help wanting to fill you in on something that may be the explanation: I found it striking that the very top of the list was Abbotsford, the heart of BC’s Bible Belt, the most religious part of an otherwise un-religious province.

[…] As for the non-British settlers, the settlers to New France originate from a few specific areas of northwestern France (see what’s up with french canadians? | hbd* chick and canadiens | hbd* chick): […]

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